Houseguest hell on wheels

April 27, 2007|ANDREW S. HUGHES Tribune Staff Writer

Like fish, an old aphorism advises, houseguests go bad after three days. Unless the houseguest is Sheridan Whiteside. He arrives already spoiled. Rude, bossy and self-centered, Whiteside makes a major stink in the household of Ernest W. Stanley as the title character in "The Man Who Came to Dinner," which opens today at Elkhart Civic Theatre. In this 1939 comedy by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Whiteside, the host of a popular radio program, slips on the ice when he arrives at the Stanley household for dinner while on a visit to Mesalia, Ohio, where Ernest Stanley owns the local factory. Confined to a wheelchair, Whiteside must stay at the Stanley home until he heals from his injuries. While there, he meddles in everyone's affairs and makes a mess of it for them and himself, including trying to disrupt budding romance between his secretary, Maggie Cutler, and local newspaper writer Bert Jefferson. "It's basically a play of verbal wit," actor Dan Johnson says. "There's a lot of gamesmanship going on. We have a lot of people trying to best each other in verbal conflict." Kaufman and Hart based Whiteside's character on their friend Alexander Woollcott, a theater critic who championed the Marx Brothers early in their career and who was the host of radio's "The Town Crier." During an unannounced visit to Hart's country home, Woollcott apparently acted much as Whiteside does in the play, including taking over the master bedroom and running roughshod over Hart's staff. Later, Hart and Kaufman joked that it was fortunate Woollcott hadn't broken a leg while there and been required to stay longer. The two playwrights offered the role of Whiteside to Woollcott for its Broadway debut, but, although Woollcott liked the play, his schedule wouldn't allow him to take the role. He did, however, play Whiteside later in a West Coast production of "The Man Who Came to Dinner." "It's about how one person can be so narrow-sighted that they kind of lose sight of what's important, and then how do you fix the problem you've created?" director John Shoup says of the play. "He's famous and a phenomenal critic, but the people who come to him, he lives through their lives. There's a starlet who comes to the door, and he just hangs on her every word, all of her gossip from Hollywood." Johnson has wanted to play Whiteside for more than 30 years and has done extensive research into the life of Woollcott, who he calls the "dean" of the Algonquin Round Table. "He was sort of the Oprah of his day," he says of Woollcott, after whom the drink Brandy Alexander is named. "When he recommended a book, sales went up." An actor with professional experience in New York City, on the West Coast, and in touring and regional theater, Johnson now lives in Union. He worked as a stagehand at Elkhart Civic when he was a teenager, but Whiteside is his first acting role for the theater. "I'm of the opinion that curmudgeons are really softies at heart, and I know that was true of Woollcott," he says. "He's irascible because he thinks humans can be improved, and he was a critic. He rubbed people wrong because he tried to improve people. I think Midwesterners would look at him as a buttinsky. I think he has a positive reason for being the way he is." Moreover, Johnson says, Woollcott championed different charitable organizations. "He was a real bleeding heart for good causes, and they lampoon that in the play," he says. "He was a big advocate for the seeing-eye dogs for the blind, and in the play he's an advocate for the criminal justice system, so there's a scene where he has a couple of reformed convicts for lunch on their way to the halfway house." The play's rights owners, Shoup says, give theaters the option of removing historical references from the text, but he hasn't. "If there's room in the program, those historical references will be noted," he says. "Woollcott knew a lot of people and never hesitated to throw their names around, and neither does Sheridan." During the rehearsal process, Shoup says, he encouraged his cast to watch some of the classic comedies of the '30s and '40s -- "a good Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn comedy," for example -- to get a feel for the rhythm of the era's bantering dialogue, although Shoup wanted the cast to avoid the 1942 film version of "The Man Who Came to Dinner." "I think we need to present these classic comedies from the '30s and '40s," he says. "It's just one of those classic shows that I think people need to see and remember that people used to sit and listen to each other talk. We don't have people writing like that. They'll still go for the slapstick or the farce, but you don't see that wit."